


The Darkness Between Us

by Ruuger



Category: The X-Files
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 08:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2501246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruuger/pseuds/Ruuger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She knew this case, she had investigated this case, so many times.  There would be no satanists or cults or rituals.  There never were."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Darkness Between Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SadieFlood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SadieFlood/gifts).



Monica stared at the phone, wishing the ringing would stop. She had only just gotten home, it was late and she was tired, and she knew the call was from work. She didn't want to answer, but she did anyway.

_"Hey, Monica, Brad here. I was just on the phone with the assistant director, and he asked me if I could recommend an agent to lead the investigations on a child abduction case. He wanted someone with experience in ritualistic crimes, and I immediately thought about you."_

The assistant director sometimes asked Brad for advice, and Brad liked telling people about it. He was far too aware of his own importance, but she liked him anyway. He was intelligent, handsome, ambitious, and funny, and they had been dancing around each other for the last few months, not quite sure which one should make the first move.

She asked him more about the case, not so much because she was interested in it as just to hear his voice. She knew this case, she had investigated this case, so many times. There would be no satanists or cults or rituals. There never were.

Of all the child abduction cases she had investigated in the last year, in only two the children had been returned to the parents alive and unharmed. All the others had been dead - if not on the outside, then on the inside. There had never been one shred of evidence of ritualistic crimes, and there had never been anything else for her to do but to watch families break apart.

There was something in this case, however, that made it feel different, a feeling which - in retrospect - she might have mistaken for hope.

"So, are you interested? They need an agent there right away."

"Sure," she replied, unthinking, and regretted immediately. She knew this case, had investigated this case. She hated this case. She hated her job. But she couldn't say no, not to Brad.

She picked up the keys she had laid down on the table only twenty minutes earlier and went back to work.

* * *

Two hours later she found herself in a Long Island suburbia, no longer as quiet as it probably had been, the streets now blocked by police cars and search parties. She pushed through the crowds and looked for someone who was in charge.

"Detective Sinclair?" she called, heading towards a middle-aged man standing on the porch. "I'm Monica Reyes from the FBI."

The man seemed to measure her in the few seconds he took before shaking her hand.

"It's good to have you here," he said, after seemingly making his mind about her, and led her aside. "I was told that you were an expert on satanic cults. Do you really think some cult might have taken the boy?"

The tremor in his voice was half hope, half fear. She shook her head. 

"I doubt it. I specialize in ritualistic crimes, but these cases rarely if ever have anything to do with cult activity. Nevertheless, we must consider it as a possibility. Our job here is to find the boy, and to do that we must keep an open mind."

The detective nodded.

"I'm not happy turning over my investigations to the FBI, but I agree, finding Luke is the most important thing and the more men we have on the case, the bigger chance we have of finding him."

She gave him an encouraging smile, or at least tried to.

"We'd better get to work then. The time's running out as we speak. I would like to start by talking to the parents."

"Barbara's in the house with one of my men and John... he's on the back yard."

There was a slight chance in Detective Sinclair's expression, which sent out warning signals in Monica's head.

"You know the parents then, personally?"

The detective looked briefly away before answering. "The boy's father works in the same precinct as I do."

Monica nodded, biting her lip. She hadn't had much time to go through the background information yet, so the fact that the child's father was a cop came as a surprise, and not at all pleasant one. She would now have to make sure that he didn't get in the way of the investigation, and that would not make her job one bit easier. 

To buy herself some time to figure out how to handle the boy's father, she left the detective on the porch and entered the house to talk to the mother. Her effort was in vain, however, as the woman didn't even acknowledge her, staring and empty air with equally empty eyes as she clutched the picture of the boy in her pale, trembling hands. 

When Monica returned outside, the sun was just setting; dark shadows creeping across the neatly trimmed lawn. It had been a warm day, and the heat of the sun was still lingering in the air, but she couldn't help shivering as she searched the backyard, looking for the father. When there was no sign of him, she turned to leave, but stopped when she heard a small noise, barely audible, from the small shed next to the garage. 

She crossed the lawn to the shed, and stepped through the open door. 

The first thing she noticed were the bicycles hanging on the walls of the shed, and it took her a second to spot the figure standing in the darkness among them. He was standing with his back towards her, looking at a little tricycle in front of him.

"Mr. Doggett?" Monica asked hesitantly, trying to catch a sight of the man's face in the dim light of the shed.

"He kept asking me if I'd take him with me," the man said, ignoring her question. "He kept asking, and I kept saying that I'd take him with me when he's old enough. He rode the bike every day, to be good enough, but I kept saying-"

His voice broke and he leaned forward, covering his face with his hand.

Monica remained in the doorway, not knowing what to say or what to do. She'd come armed with questions, but they were all suddenly gone; disappeared with all the training and experience she had about dealing with families of victims. She was struck with a terrible urge to run away, to just walk back to her car and turn over the case to some other agent, and yet and the same time she had a strong feeling that she was exactly where she was supposed to be, like her whole life had been leading up to this moment.

"Agent Reyes?"

The spell broke, the pressure of the darkness around her suddenly l lifting. When she turned around, she found Detective Sinclair standing behind her. He peered past her into the dark shed. 

"John, are you there? Barbara wants to talk to you." He looked at Monica. "Or do you still need him?"

Monica shook her head.

"No, I'm done."

* * *

They found their first and only suspect on the morning of the second day. Bob Harvey, a local sleazebag who had often been suspected in similar cases, sometimes even convicted. 

"He keeps coming back like a bad dime," said Detective Sinclair when they arrested the man. 

Someone had seen Harvey around when Luke had disappeared, but there was no evidence, and in the end Harvey walked. They worked night and day, combing the neighbourhood, questioning passers-by, interrogating Harvey, racing time. Even Brad helped, although looking back at those days, knowing what she knew now, the thought of his involvement made her angry. Perhaps, if it hadn't been for Brad, they might have caught the killer there and then. One of the many ifs and maybes that would haunt her for years afterwards.

The boy's father was also involved with the investigation but was smart enough to stay out of the way of the FBI. He didn't bother her or the other agents like she had feared, but his presence alone was enough to distract her. Wherever she went, wherever she looked, he was there, like a ghost.

She hardly slept in those three days - none of them did - except a few hours every now and then on a couch in some empty office. Already on the first night she felt like she had been on the case forever and as hours went by without any leads the world slowly turned into one endless hell of caffeine, cigarettes, and tears. 

Just like all the other cases, only worse.

She had always prided herself on her professionalism, not becoming emotional even in the hardest cases, but this time it was as if she had known the child herself, that strong was the connection she felt for him. Too often she would excuse herself in the middle of a briefing and hide in the restrooms to cry. When she wasn't around people assumed she was on a cigarette break, and by the end of the second day some of the officers had nicknamed her Agent Nicotine. 

It was just past the 48-hour time limit; that magic number in a missing persons case when even the last remnants of hope dissolve into despair. The agents were all gathered in their ad hoc HQ to go through yet again their list of local sex offenders, browsing dossiers filled with details of crimes that they all desperately hoped were not going to be related to this one. As she tossed yet another file in the 'not likely' pile, Monica felt again the suffocating sense of darkness return, so tangible that it was as if the air in the room had suddenly turned into murky water. Excusing herself, she grabbed her packet of cigarettes for cover, and headed for the restrooms. 

When she stepped into the hallway, she spotted Detective Sinclair walking towards her. She could already feel the burn of tears at the back of her throat, knew that if she had to speak to anyone right now, she would break, and so she turned on her heels and ducked into an empty interrogation room instead. She was already crying when she closed the door and leaned to it, only to realise that the room wasn't empty as she had thought.

"I'm sorry, I, I can leave."

Luke's father was sitting by the desk, looking at mugshots, a half-empty cup of coffee in front of him. He began to gather his things.

She wanted to leave herself, because she knew that if she stayed, she might let out the horrible truth at it was too late for mugshots and interrogations and search parties, because Luke was lost in the darkness, and would never come back. But the darkness held her in place, leaving her unable to do anything but stare at him

"I can leave," he repeated, but didn't move, and she idly wondered if he could feel it too.

Finally, after what seemed like forever but was only a few seconds, she managed to gather herself and with a muttered apology slipped out of the room.

* * *

On the third day someone recruited a psychic who told them that the boy had been taken by a woman who had lost her own son and wanted Luke to replace him.

Even though she wanted to keep an open mind, she didn't give much heed to the psychic, knowing in her guts that the man was a fraud. Luke's father took it even worse.

"Why don't you bring in goddamn David Copperfield next," she heard him shout at his lieutenant afterwards. "We need men on the streets looking for him, not some goddamn psychic mumbo jumbo."

In the end they did everything humanly possible to find Luke alive. How could they have known that he had already been dead when Brad had called her.

When the phone rang in the early morning hours of the fourth day she didn't want to answer because she knew what it would be about.

* * *

The fog was rising when she walked across the small field, making the world seem unreal and dreamlike. The people around her moved as in slow motion and the scenery itself was featureless like an old black and white movie, and there was voice at the back of her head wondering - hoping - that it was just a nightmare.

The walk up the small hill seemed to last forever, hopeful uncertainty turning into depressing certainty on every step. It was over. It was too late. They had failed. Again.

The boy looked out of place lying there on the damp grass under the trees, like a rag doll someone had tossed away. When she saw him, she felt the tears return, but managed to control herself, to put on her professional mask, and concentrate on seeing the boy as nothing but evidence. Stab wounds. No blood. Killed elsewhere. Tire tracks. Foot prints. There would be time to cry later.

She crouched down to take a closer look at the body when suddenly she sensed the darkness reach towards her like some creature made out of pure evil. She staggered at the sensation, but corrected herself, and right then and there, before her eyes, the body burned into ashes. She glanced at the others and realised that they had not seen the same. When she looked at the body again it was back to way it had been, unburned. But the evil remained.

A sound of an approaching car tore her back into the real world. She lifted her eyes off the body and saw the boy's father park his car on the side of the road. They hadn't called the parents yet, so he must have heard about it on the police radio. He ran towards them, but stopped few yards away.

"No." 

It was a statement, not a desperate scream as she had expected, as if the man believed that if he denied the reality with enough conviction, he could force it to change.

Detective Sinclair walked to him, tried to talk him into leaving, but the father wouldn't move.

"I have to see him."

She moved aside with the others as the detective and the father passed them, feeling glad to move further away from the body and the dark thing that had touched it. She knew she had not imagined it, and when the father looked at the body she knew he too saw it, the ashes and the malicious darkness that fed on their desperation. She knew it from the way he stopped midbreath, the way he turned to look at her, his eyes wide with terror.

"I'm sorry, John," Detective Sinclair said, breaking the connection that had briefly been between her and the father.

She wanted to say something to comfort the man, but words stuck to her throat. Instead she put her hand on his shoulder, trying to fool herself that it would help, but knowing that it wouldn't. He didn't even notice her gesture.

He whispered the boy's name and kneeled on the grass, still not crying, and stared at the body, not touching it (she liked to think that it was his inner cop telling him not to disturb the evidence) until the crime scene investigators had done their job. When they came to take the body away he lifted the dead boy into his arms and put it gently on the stretcher.

"I'm sorry", he said to the boy and took the child's hand onto his own. "I'm sorry."

She felt the tears build in her eyes again. It was over. They had failed. She turned to walk back to the car. Behind her the darkness laughed in triumph.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this fic started off as just the final scene, but then it kinda got away from me and probably would have ended up twice as long as it did if I hadn't ran out of time :)


End file.
